Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Excerpted from “September 1, 1939,” by W. H. Auden
The water at the lake where I work is diminishing in volume and clarity. Realizing I might find an apt description of its quality in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” I toted my Norton Anthology of British Literature to work on Sunday morning to refresh my memory before visitor traffic increased.
Coleridge’s description of the hellish waters of the secret sea was indeed apt. “The water, like a witch’s oils,/ Burnt green, and blue and white.” But it was his ballad’s powerful message that began to fill my depleted reserves
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
My hunger for poetry quickened, I turned to some of the poems by Yeats and Auden. Auden’s elegy for Yeats brought tears to my eyes, but it was “September 1, 1939” that made my head spin. Yeats’ “gyres” – that is, his notion of the circles of time – seem inescapably accurate when one considers the world from Auden’s perspective in NYC on the occasion of Germany’s invasion of Poland and how his first stanza could stand as a description of the cultural landscape today (vaccine mandates aside).
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Six months ago, as the covid nightmare continued its unfolding, I began reading works by Alice Miller and Bruno Bettelheim to understand the psychology of those who had accepted the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. I hoped to be able to explain to myself why so many individuals today were allowing their liberties to be constricted inexorably in the name of a virus that statistics demonstrate is essentially banal.
One inescapable lesson I learned was that we seem to have forgotten what Auden, Miller, Bettelheim and “all schoolchildren” knew: “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.”
My ex-husband, for instance, essentially a high-level administrator at Harvard, no doubt shares in full-on divisive hate fest that is the “vaxxed vs. anti-vaxxed” drama. In this public passion play, we have been chosen for sides like school children on the playground with all the same non-reflexive motives as 10 year olds possess. He would not see himself (or, more specifically, blame his parents whose families were expelled from Hungary after WWII for having been forcibly conscripted by the Nazis) as one “tho whom evil is done,” but his mother, as much as she might have loved her only son, would find herself in despair shrieking at him when he misbehaved, “You make me want to kill myself.”
Trauma cascades down generations and pretending it doesn’t not only serves no one but traps us in the same sickening loops.
Just as Miller and Betteleheim traced the rise of fascism and the obeisance to it among the German populace from the widely practiced child-rearing behaviors at the turn of the 19th century, so we encounter a populace today so traumatized by decades of consumer culture that they are unable to realize that their freedoms are being curtailed because they were never truly experienced what it means to be free.
Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving is quite astute on this. It’s impossible to choose one or two quotations to sum up this short work, but something from the end might provide a sense of its argument:
Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton — well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place …. Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.
Auden’s poem reflects this massive pain and suffering of modern man in this way
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
He, like Fromm some years later, sees the problem as one “bred in the bone” from childhood (“children afraid of the night/Who have never been happy or good”) — that of craving what it cannot have: “to be loved alone.”
What this “love” comprises is manufactured by the culture industry. Fromm delineates some of these notions of “love” that palliate our starved sense of ourselves. As Fromm describes one typical scenario
Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” and hope for a fair bargain. One of the most significant expressions of love, and especially of marriage with this alienated structure, is the idea of the “team.” In any number of articles on happy marriage, the ideal described is that of the smoothly functioning team. This description is not too different from the idea of a smoothly functioning employee; he should be “reasonably independent,” co-operative, tolerant, and at the same time ambitious and aggressive.
Some fifteen years earlier, Auden describes what, beyond what’s served in the “dives” on 52nd Street, serves to minimally nourish people terrorized into accepting less that what would truly satiate them.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
The two — love and work — are the mantras emplaced by the corporate culture industry. The form of love people are psychologically engineered to secure in a world inherently insecure is implicitly designed to get he employee back to work, buy the consumer goods, pay the mortgage, take up useless hobbies, train offspring to do same. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Because nothing I encounter can be disentangled from my personal story, I want to add that my copy of Fromm’s book once belonged to my former lover/best friend Frank. At the memorial held in celebration of his life last month, his family offered books that had comprised his personal collection for attendees to take home. Too many conflicting emotions were coursing through me to make strategic choices, but when I spied the title and author of this non-fiction book from a pile of poetry collections, I was compelled to choose it.
I have no idea when he acquired it, why, or what he gleaned from it. But in his indelible manner, he highlighted certain passages, retaining the qualities of a diligent scholar even when it came to learning more about love and, perhaps, his inability to find surcease from his quest to find it. What struck me most in these underlined sections was how he gravitated to those sentences that confirmed his own biases, not to insights that would have threatened them. For instance, he was a man traumatized by his father’s lack of praise, but nothing of what Fromm covers on this is underlined.
I, like all of us, will forget, remember, and forget again many things gleaned throughout my lifetime, including my experience of reading Fromm’s brief treatise on The Art of Loving through the lens of someone who meant /still means so much to me. But one conclusion I believe I will retain is that we tell ourselves stories about ourselves that, as much as they appear to liberate us continue to trap us into cycles of pain and suffering. That is why art such as Auden’s remains so power if we take moments to return, to study, to reflect.
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
My Norton Anthology footnote tells me that Auden eventually revised this last line of this penultimate stanza to “We must love one another and die.” I wonder, too, if he were alive today, whether he would say “There is no such thing as the State.” Perhaps for what he wanted to say and when he needed to speak it, that was an acceptable provisional truth. Maybe it is today. I would love to have the chance to discuss that with him, or with my friend Frank, over some drinks in a 52nd Street dive today. But since that isn’t possible, I will make a promise to keep thinking, keep returning, keep disbelieving my own stories so that despite being “Beleaguered by the same / Negation and despair” I may “Show an affirming flame.”
Here is a link to Auden’s complete poem.
https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939
An Irksome Woman 